The Love Committee
All is unfair in love and war.
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At least she looked like her photos. Raven hair, feline eyes, heroin-chic frame. Never mind the venue—hip postcode, oat milk, Palestinian cola.
“Oh, you’re tall!” she said in italics.
What does one say to that? ‘Thanks, I worked ever so hard for this.’ Never mind. I sat down and ordered a flat white.
“Milk?” asked the barista.
“Just the, erm, normal milk. Please.”
The barista looked at me and began, silently, to calculate the likelihood that I voted Reform, liked Nigel Farage reels, and thought Palestine was a province of Narnia.
My date ventured: “So, you’re a writer? And how is that? What with AI and all? So that—Christopher—makes you… empathetic.”
My Fitbit buzzed. My heart thrummed at 155 bpm. Am I striding up Pen-y-Fan? No—my date looked like Jane from Breaking Bad. Readers with XY chromosomes will know how this ends.
I lost the ability to shepherd words down from my brain and neatly along my tongue. Verbs became nouns and nouns became verbs. Sentences sunk into quicksand. She enunciated each syllable of my name—Chris-tuh-fah—like a child who never tired of play. This dissolved my pre-emptive list of dislikes.
Apart from the conviction that I might die or go mad at any moment, the date ended in success. As I tiptoed behind her out the door and into the daylight, I shot my most right-wing grin at the barista. Hard cheese, comrade.
It wasn’t just her looks. She taught me a new word each day. Granted, she didn’t lift them at will from the glorious Chamber’s Dictionary. There was empath and holding space and unpacking and processing and a mystical force called the patriarchy.
Her friends, needless to say, were not founding members of Oxford Sour. They branded anyone with wealth, intelligence, looks, or means beyond their ample supplies of each as privileged. Girl, 27, was resolute in her own foundations. But her friends sniffed out oppressive forces in a packet of Marlboro.
A BBC News alert could reduce them to inconsolable foam. A pinging iPhone spun Girl, 27—the in-house therapist—into a maelstrom of soothing buzzwords.
If, say, Bloomsbury Publishing rejected one of these friends with a terse email, this was not proof of a perilous job market but a conspiracy of men. Men who looked like me.
My skin colour and genitalia convicted me of high crimes. These disappointments were at least partly my fault. The epithet—white male—clouded the air like sarin gas.
They called this antiracism—one word. Lurking in bottles of culturally appropriated sriracha, snarling at the bottom of Daunt Books tote bags—the white male conjured juju spells like a mad witch-doctor.
Despite my misgivings, I joined them at a gathering in an enclave of East London. The lampposts were festooned with Stop Gentrification! stickers daubed by the hand of trust-funded arts graduates who wouldn’t notice if their rent jumped from £1,200 to £5,000 overnight.
On the bamboo coffee table, I plonked an eight-pack of a mid-range lager called Red Stripe, a Jamaican beer. To my non-astonishment, Girl, 27, had orbiting her head like satellites a constellation of men dressed like turn-of-the-century stevedores. They all worked in something called ‘creative.’
My reserves of safe-for-consumption small talk slicked dry within seven minutes. A balding, ventricose Millennial who smiled when he should nod and nodded when he should smile, shuffled forward. Eyeing the can in my hand, he said:
“Red Stripe. Nice. That’s Jamaican beer, right?”
On the can rested the words ‘Red Stripe Jamaican Beer.’ The only accurate observation of the night.
Heads swivelled towards my choice of beer. In my head swirled two possibilities: either my purchase suggested a worldly embrace of British Afro-Caribbean heritage, or here goes Pasty McWhiteman appropriating the lineage of a historically marginalised culture.
My inquisitor glanced at my Red Stripe and then at the cans of Guinness resting in every hand his eyes could see. With the show-trial adjourned, I hummed Come Out, Ye Black and Tans—the old Irish rebel ditty. Hard cheese, comrade.
I swigged my beer, imagining each gulp to possess voodoo powers. One big gulp conjured the image of a lovely 92-year-old Jamaican lady in her Sunday best tripping over a kerb.
“What’s so funny?” asked my therapy-grinned friend.
Nothing was the answer, both metaphorically and literally. What struck me early was their signed-on-the-dotted-line commitment to not find anything even remotely humorous. No joy nor outbreaks of laughter were even momentarily possible, what with all the unspeakable trauma in Gaza and Sudan and whatnot.
Any misfortune, a feature once accepted as a part of life as breathing in oxygen, met the doormat of the patriarchy. Snapped a shoelace? Patriarchy. Unseasonably warm? Climate catastrophe. Unseasonably chilly? White males.
Every fifteen minutes or so, Girl, 27, checked in on me, only to rush off and firehose another outbreak of reality rudely announcing itself to one of the throng.
A quadruple gin and tonic is best enjoyed alone or at least amongst those who believe that men cannot get pregnant.
My reluctant playmate, dressed in overalls which didn’t quite believe in him, ventured:
“So, you write about politics?”
Before my lips could separate, he reeled off a well-tread litany of absurdities and warned of the coming fascism. Gays in the closet. Signs saying, ‘no blacks, no dogs, no Irish’ stamped on shop fronts.
I offered a few statistics from the Social Attitudes survey. Few in Britain care about with whom one sleeps, nor the colour of one’s skin.
“You should consider the source of those statistics, actually…” he spat back. His male allies nodded like Subbuteo figurines.
I got the feeling that if they solved every unspeakable injustice by breakfast, they’d publish a fresh list by lunch.
On the way home, we stopped at a pub where pork scratchings were starter, main, and dessert.
Girl, 27, swigged a double gin and lemonade.
“I’m so impressed with you, Christopher,” she said.
“Why?”
“Well, look—I know my friends can be… forthright.”
My cheeks broke into Morse code.
“You handled it well. I mean, making up those statistics was a genius move.”
Three days later, my WhatsApp flashed.
The message began like those job rejection letters one gets from Domino’s Pizza. I scanned the rest. Words like holding space and patriarchal forces welded together in sentence shapes. At least the only c-word she reached for was Christopher.
I cracked open a can of Red Stripe, the voodoo doll beer, and poured its golden contents down my neck. A Jamaican pensioner stepped on a plug. Another snapped a shoelace.
“Better them than me,” I thought.
